The Signal Flame Page 10

  He tried to smile, but he felt like the muscles were gone around his mouth, and he said, No, Ruth. I just came by to see you.

  Thank you, she said, and reached for the bedrail again. He took her hand and held it, and she closed her eyes.

  Rovnávaha motioned for him to stay and then left the room.

  Bo put her hand back down on the bedside and studied her face. Lips cracked and ringed in a chalky white. Stitches at the cheekbone. Her black hair matted and cut short. Raccoon bruises around both eyes.

  Ruth, he said. Do you remember anything?

  She opened her eyes again and turned to look at him and nodded. The baby, she said. She cried when I held her, Bo. I want to hold her again. She glanced down at the foot of the bed where the priest had stood, then back to Bo.

  Let’s wait until you’re stronger, he said.

  They’re all gone, aren’t they?

  He waited and said, I’m sorry, Ruth.

  She closed her eyes and he thought she had gone to sleep, but she lifted her hand and took his and squeezed it and, without turning, said, Won’t they want to know what I called her?

  What do you want to call her? Tell me and I’ll make sure they know.

  Clare.

  Clare what?

  Clare Frances.

  All right. I’ll tell Father Rovnávaha. He’ll say the Mass. My mother and I both will be there.

  For my father, too? He’ll do the funeral, the priest?

  Yes, Bo said.

  She tried to lift her hand to her face but could not for the IV. Bo took a handkerchief from his pocket and pressed it gently to her cheek.

  They sat for a while, hand in hand without speaking, until her grip slackened and he leaned back in the chair and watched her breathe and wondered where it was she would go when the time came. Whom did she have now? Bo lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it, then placed it back at her side and went to find Rovnávaha.

  The priest was standing in the hallway by a large window that looked out onto the valley. Bo came up beside him and said, The man who serves the Lord and commands all others. Thank you, Father.

  Rovnávaha nodded, his eyes unmoving from the view outside. She’s lucky to be alive, he said. The way they had her in that car saved her. But they had to take out her spleen. She needed lots of blood. Romanelli told me he gave her extreme unction right away, she was so bad.

  She just wasn’t ready, I guess, Bo said.

  No, Rovnávaha said.

  They watched as a bank of clouds skipping west blocked out the sun for a moment, then reemerged, brighter somehow, and they could tell all of a sudden what was water and what was mud by the way the light was or was not reflected on its surface.

  Rovnávaha looked at his watch. Our ride’s leaving.

  Bo said, She told me she wanted the baby’s name to be Clare Frances. She wants her buried with her father. And you to do the funeral.

  The baby will be taken care of, the priest said. There are rubrics for the unbaptized. Let’s go.

  She was, Bo said. I did it. In the rain.

  Rovnávaha had begun to walk down the hall, and he stopped and turned and looked at Bo. Was she alive when you got there? he asked.

  She bawled like she was mad as hell at that storm, Bo said.

  The priest moved his head from side to side as though looking for a way out of a room. And did you say the words? I mean, you knew what to do?

  Bo straightened in front of the man, the two of them standing eye to eye in the empty hospital corridor, and he could not help feeling he had gained a victory when, until today, every struggle was becoming a losing one. And it was Rovnávaha who, for the second time, had handed it to him.

  Bo ran his fingers through his beard from the ends of his mouth. I said the only words there were to say, Padre. If that girl’s not counted among the believers now, then I don’t want any part of them.

  Rovnávaha put his arm around Bo’s shoulders, and the two of them walked back up the stairs that led to the roof.

  CHAPTER

  NINE

  TWO BOYS WHO HAD GROWN up on the Flats and now had no house to go home to found a Daisy Red Ryder in fair condition among the boxes and bins of junk that began to appear along the roads in Dardan. There were a handful of BBs left in the magazine, and they hiked down along the rushing creek until they came to a place where a fallen tree had lodged up against a huge stone, and they saw more rats than they had ever seen in their lives, scurrying in and out of the cover of that tree. They came within ten yards of the pack and the older boy who had found the gun commenced firing, plinking some of the smaller rats off the stone into the water but doing little more than making the bigger ones jump from the sting and turn back to whatever it was that had gathered them.

  The wind shifted then, and on it came a stench that halted the boys as if they had walked into a wall. The older one lowered the gun, and his friend reached down and picked up a rock to throw, because it seemed all of a sudden that the rats were swarming toward them like some bristling black carpet that moved of its own accord. They turned and tried to run with their hands covering their noses, but the younger boy tripped and fell, eye level with the mass of squealing rodents. He dropped the rock where he lay and began to scream. The older one ran back and grabbed him by the arm and pulled him up, and they took off along the creek as fast as they could until they came to a group of firemen flushing out a hydrant.

  The paramedics knew it was Mary Younger from the strips of sheet and tape that clung to the tree branches, and by the broken leg bones cleaned of flesh and exposed. They matched her dental records and sent the body to the funeral home where Paul Younger and baby Clare remained, and all three awaited their burial as a family.

  And so it was, two weeks after the flood had come, the ground stable enough for a backhoe to dig three graves, that Father Rovnávaha said the funeral Mass for the only lives from the town that had been lost, and who would be placed side by side next to Walter and Augustin Younger, patriarchs of a family who had lived in Dardan for over a hundred years and had been winnowed down to one.

  Bo called on every workman at the mill to come and help bear a coffin. Hannah did the readings and the Psalm, and she wondered in her heart at how she had come in this life to be a woman asked to put to rest in peace the man whom she had hated for killing her husband, even when she knew that hate was not the reason why Becks had died. Maybe if they had had their dinner, broken bread at the table in her house, she would have felt something for them now. When she read out loud the words of Saint Paul, We shall all be changed, she thought of Sam, who had given her a grandchild, the child who might have changed them all forever. And now that child lay wrapped in a shroud. When the priest rose to read the Gospel, she listened to the Beatitudes, listened to him pause on Blessed are the peacemakers, and still she felt nothing.

  After Mass she rode with Bo out to the cemetery and listened again to the priest, his voice tired and breaking as he shouldered the weight of laying to rest two generations of one family. And yet he spoke of the promise of inheritance, an inheritance not of riches, land, or a home but of a kingdom, one so unlikely and yet so certain a place that it had been prepared and was waiting for them from the foundation of the world. A kingdom, she thought. Her faith was once that strong, but she doubted it now, doubted not that there was a promise but that the promise claimed was a gift to hold, a joy that could assuage all sadness. No, she had come to believe that the only thing one could be certain of was loss. The loss of others as one lived on. Loss as the last thing one left behind.

  Rovnávaha lifted his eyes from the book at that moment and said to those gathered for the committal, Just as the covenant of God with those few who remained on the earth remained amid destruction and devastation, only the sun and what they carried had not been lost. And so He promised seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night. Not one of these shall cease.

  Then the priest put his head down and prayed the prayer that p
romised every tear would be wiped away, closed the book, and said to those at the graveside, Go in peace.

  No floodwaters ever touched Endless Roughing, and Bo and Jeff Lamoreaux gathered in Bo’s office every morning at seven-thirty and honed their plans for letting the town use the yard as an early staging ground for cleanup and recovery efforts, then shifting back to full running of the mill once rebuilding in the town began. But on the day after they buried Paul and Mary and Clare Frances Younger, Jeff found Bo standing by his old Dodge pickup, parked beneath a pine near the tally shed. The rest of the yard was filled with pallets of government-issued cheese, powdered milk, boxes of iodine, and plastic bottles of bleach.

  Bo had his hand on the top of the tailgate, and Jeff said from behind him, You coming to work?

  Bo turned and nodded and slapped the inside of the truck. I was just thinking that if my brother was here, he’d have this thing running in a heartbeat.

  Jeff shook his head. Have I not taught you anything, Bo Konar, since the auspicious day that I came to this mill? You know I raced your brother once. And won.

  Bo laughed. Are you telling me you can get this thing running?

  Jeff said, You just got to say the word.

  Over the course of the week, they pulled the wheels and scraped the mud and rust off the brakes, then cleaned and repacked the wheel bearings. They dropped the oil pan and hosed it out, changed the oil, transmission fluid, and final-drive lube, then siphoned the fuel out of the gas tank and replaced the filter. The cylinder heads of the engine were dry, and Jeff said that they could only hope there wasn’t any water in the carburetor float bowls. Then they pulled the front bench seat and took a wet-vac to whatever cavity still held water, and wiped down the dashboard and the doors inside with diluted bleach, of which there was plenty in that yard. A friend of Jeff’s in Noxen had a junk ’63 Dodge pickup, and they took its radiator and the bench seat for twenty dollars and a case of beer. They bolted the seat in last.

  It was a Friday night when they were done, and Bo stood leaning against the wall of the shed with his arms crossed. Jeff poured a little gas into the carb to prime it, then climbed into the driver’s seat and put the key in the ignition. The engine labored to turn over, caught once, and stalled. He pumped the gas to fill the lines, tried again, and got the same. He looked over at Bo, who shook his head, but Jeff held up one finger, pumped the gas pedal three more times, then held off when he could smell it, and let the whole thing rest. He looked like he had fallen asleep with his hands on the wheel when he lifted his nose, sniffed, and turned the key again. The engine sputtered and pushed blue smoke out of the tailpipe. Jeff stayed hunched over the wheel and listening, revved the engine slightly, then a little more, until it was idling fast but steady and the exhaust had cleared. He jumped out and bonged the hood with his fist. There you go! he shouted at Bo.

  The truck rattled and coughed out the back every few seconds like a steam train lying on its side, but it kept running and did not sound like it would stop.

  Bo smiled and kept shaking his head. I should have had you replace the clutch, too, he said. Then I’d have a new truck.

  You should have got your ass to dry ground when you saw the waters come, is what you should have done, Jeff said, then stepped back and worked a cigarette from a pack. He cupped the match in his hand and leaned his head toward it. The bad news is, he said as he inhaled, dropped the match on the ground, and toed it with his boot, you won’t be driving this thing two months from now.

  Summer settled in toward the end of June, and the town began to dry on the high pressure and string of hot days that stretched into July, so that whenever talk turned to the weather, people shook their heads. Hannah went back to tending a small garden she had begun in May, but the sudden heat scorched the late and puny shoots that had managed to come up, shoots of everything from tomatoes and peppers to pumpkin and squash, which already had white leaf mold on them that jumped from plant to plant. Only the rhubarb she grew on the border of her garden seemed to thrive. That and the lettuce she planted from seed wherever she ripped out the rangy and ruined squash. Each day she stopped and made toast and tea at ten-thirty and waited for Bo’s morning phone call from the mill, during which he would ask how her plants were doing, and she would say, It’s just one lousy summer all around.

  When the Salamander rose, it rose fast, but it fell fast, too (not like what the Susquehanna did to the Wyoming Valley), and toward the end of July, Dardan ran something like the town it was before the flood, even if it no longer looked like it. The front-end loaders that had scraped the roads of mud were gone, and the steady stream of trucks hauling refuse was replaced by another stream delivering lumber. Every now and then the lopping thud of a helicopter echoed in the mountains as it flew up through the pass but did not land, the sound fading into the distance.

  Logging trucks pulled in to the mill three and four times a day. The saws and planes hummed from seven in the morning to seven at night. Bo put coffee on his tab at Ruby’s for all the men, and he hired a lunch truck to come to the yard every day at noon. He left Jeff in charge of the office and went out into the sheds and talked with the men on break and thanked them for pulling together, told them where they stood on orders, how much he anticipated to complete before the summer was over. Most of these men his grandfather had hired, the skilled ones, anyway. A few Bo had brought to the mill. They were older than he was and had families and mortgages, and some spoke of sending a kid to college. Jozef had told him the hardest thing he would have to do was sit behind the desk in his office and listen to their requests for a raise, knowing what expenses and burdens were behind that need for more money. You know, the truth is, son, Jozef said to Bo the day he handed over the mill, our money really does grow on trees. Just not in every season.

  And Jozef was right. Bo decided he would tell the men who worked for him what he could about profits and loss and quarterly revenue. Though he knew that most of them feared for what they might do or where they might go if Endless Roughing ever closed down, it was Bo who feared it more. Feared he would lose their respect and then their skill, and this alone would be the death knell of the mill that was his now. And so he never said no whenever one of those men knocked on his door, even after he had shown them the books and the margins thin as plywood, even after they nodded, as if to understand that the grandson of the man who had brought them into this trade was hiding nothing and wanted only to make the business run for everyone. Even after he told them that another fifteen cents an hour was all he could give them when they had come in hoping for twenty-five.

  Friday of the first week of August, Bo asked Jeff to close up the place, and he got in his truck at four o’clock and drove up to the hill house.

  He had not been there since before the flood. The grass, thick and stocky, was overgrown from the steps at the top of the drive all the way to the field’s edge, so it looked like there was no difference between what was lawn and what was not, but for the tips of what grasses grew in each place. He stood at the bottom of those steps for a minute and reminded himself there was only one more full month of summer left, then fall, and then what did he have this house for, if just a place to come and watch the weeds grow? He walked toward the barn, slid open the bottom door, and went inside. He scanned the garden tools left on hooks near a corner, took down a sickle, went back outside, and walked over to the front of the house.

  Hannah’s going to want to know where the hell I’ve gotten to, he thought, and high-stepped through the tall rye grass and Queen Anne’s lace until he stood on the nearly covered stone walkway, took his shirt off and tied it around his waist, then held the sickle in his right hand and began to mow in rows, one long sweep after another, moving outward and up the hill toward the porch and around the side of the house, his swing as even as the pendulum of a clock, until a low even matte of fallen grass lay over the sloping front yard.

  He leaned the sickle against his hip, untied his shirt and wiped his face, then put it back on and
buttoned it up to his neck and buttoned the sleeves. He walked into the barn, replaced the sickle and picked up a bamboo rake, went back outside, and began to gather into piles all that he could carry under one arm. Then he picked them up two at a time and walked them to the edge of the field where bunches of switchgrass swayed in the evening breeze, and he dropped the cuttings into the dirt furrow that acted like a border along the entire length of the back lawn. When he was done, he wiped his forehead with his shirtsleeve and surveyed the lawn in the late afternoon. There was plenty yet to mow, but he had cleared all of it from around the house so that the place did not look so derelict. He said out loud, as though the old man were right next to him, All right, Pop. Tomorrow I’ll get a lawn mower up here and finish the rest, and then I’ll call some builders and the bank and we can get on with it.

  The house cast a long shadow down to the east, and Bo turned and looked up the hill where the sun was an orange ball hovering above the top of the field. He walked back to his truck and got in, turned it around, and drove down the road through town and up to the farm.

  He found half a chicken with roasted carrots and parsnips in the warming tray of the oven, washed his hands and got a beer from the refrigerator, and sat down at the table to eat. He was finished reading the newspaper and drinking a second beer, when Hannah came into the kitchen and sat down across from him. She did not ask why he was late, and he did not offer.

  She said, Father Rovnávaha called me this afternoon. Ruth Younger’s going to be discharged as soon as she knows where she’s going to live.

  Bo looked up from the paper. There’s nothing there now, he said. That house in the Flats? It’s gone.

  They know, Hannah said. They tracked down her mother. She’s living in a trailer in Florida somewhere. Ruth said she’ll be all right if that’s where she has to go. They’re waiting to hear back from her.